Introduction to Boxalino Winning Interactions Admin

Owned by Sylvain Paillard
Last updated: Mar 17, 2021
9 min read

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The content of this page is presented in a video tutorial, have a look:

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What is the Boxalino Winning Interactions Admin?

The Boxalino Intelligence Admin is a Cloud-based Administration interface for Marketers, Content managers, Optimization specialists, and IT integrators to configure the real-time behavior of Boxalino in your web-site and other operational systems.

The Admin is structured in 8 menus, each providing a list of configuration views.

The first home view is the Widget & Page Optimizer view (as per the following screen-shot):

Each Menu and Sub-Menu is documented in the Boxalino Intelligence Admin Documentation.

The Boxalino Admin does not manage the loading of your data. Please make sure that you have successfully loaded your data in your account using the Boxalino Data Integration

The key concepts: Widgets & Narratives

The Boxalino Intelligence Admin is centered around 2 key concepts:

  • The Widget & Page Optimizers (WPO) and their Widgets

  • The Narrative (and their Layout Blocks)

We will guide you now through the explanations of what these two concepts are and how all the other parts of the admin connect to them.

What is a Widget?

A Widget is a real-time logic that selects and orders records (for example products). Each widget belongs to one WPO (Widget & Page Optimizer) and what type of records is returned by a widget depends on its parent WPO.

For example, widgets in the SEARCH/NAVI WPO will return ordered lists of products for your search result page and your product listing pages. Widgets in the CROSS-SELL WPO will return cross-selling product recommendations in the basket, etc.

As we will see later in this page, the real-time selection logic is built with Best Practices which are each configured as Filter, Ranker, or Scorer.

It is called Widget simply because the result of this real-time logic is typically displayed as a “widget” or a “visual block” on a page of your Website (e.g.: a block of product recommendations).

What is a Narrative?

A Narrative is a page layout (or a set of zones in a page layout) with headless content (headless because the content is not specific to any view, it can be used in any channel: web-site, e-mail, print marketing, …).

A Narrative can be a complete web page layout or the layouts of sections (or zones) of the page.

As you integrate the Narratives in your Website, you decide which narrative appears where (in which pages or page zones) during the technical integration.

For example, for a search result page, the layout of the search results will be defined by a narrative (e.g., as in the example we will see in details later in this page: first a search message, then a banner, then the pagination and sorting option, then a grid of product results, then pagination again and below an SEO text, and on the left of it all the facets (search refinement filters).

How to configure the strategy of a Widget?

First, understand the Filters, Rankers, and Scorers

As described above, the primary role of a Widget is to define the logic used to return an ordered list of products (or other contents) in real-time on your Website (or other operational systems).

An example widget with 1 filter (price > 0), 1 ranker (filter instock) and 1 scorer (all-time sales count).

This logic is split into 3 parts: Filters, Rankers, and Scorers.

Filters

Filters define must-have logics which should be applied. This means that only products which match all the filters are returned.

Example: do not show any products out-of-stock.

Rankers

Rankers make sure some results are on top (or on the bottom). There can be more than one ranker in which case the top rankers are more important than the lower rankers.

Example: put in-stock products always before out-of-stock products.

Scorers

Scorers will define what type of products appear higher than others based on the sum of their weights.

As scorers are significantly less strong than Filters and Rankers, they will only order the list of results within the results lists defined by the Filters and the Rankers.

Example: increase the score (i.e.: display “higher”) of products currently in sales.

Then, configure using Best Practices

Each Filter, Ranker, and Scorer can be configured on the basis of a Best Practice.

Every widget suggests a list of Best Practices for the setup, to a/b test first, or do consider as advanced cases.

Best Practices are built on 7 different groups addressing all the different types of Filters, Rankers, and Scorers. While some of them are based on personalization (e.g.: Visitor and Customer Journey Personalization), others are based on your active campaigns* (Marketing Alignment) or on product data and statistics (Product & Content Statistics and Attributes). Finally, they also cover the context of the page (what is the current Product Detail Page, what is currently in the basket, what is the current search of the user with Product & Content Contexts and Search Term Relevance).

Additional Effects

Finally, other configurations might affect the Result List provided by the Widget:

Semantic Filters (only for search)

Can be both setting additional Filters, Rankers, or Scorers based on the keyword (by detecting the meaning of the terms) or redirecting the user to another page (e.g.: a search on a brand can redirect the user to the brand page)

Rules

You can also set rules to curate very precisely the order and selection on a specific page.

Final Results

After passing through the Semantic Filters and Rules, we have now the Final Results as they will be shown to the user.

Aside from it, you can define 2 additional data which will be part of the Widget response:

Facets

You can configure what filtering options should be calculated and showed to the user to refine his search (including many visual options)

Response

Response will define additional response parameters which should be used, for example, to add a specific search message to the user above the results when a search is done.

How to configure a Narrative

First, make sure your IT created the Layout Blocks

In order to create a layout in a Narrative, you will need that all the templates which are available to be used with Boxalino have been prepared by your IT and added to the Layout Blocks.

This simply means that when you are creating a layout, you need to select which Layout Block appears first, second, … and you need to provide to each block the parameters that it needs.

So you can look at the Layout Blocks as the building blocks of any Narrative Layout.

Then, define a Narrative Layout

To define the layout that the user will see on the page, you need to configure a Narrative Layout.

Here are a few important things to understand about Narrative Layouts:

Fix or Conditional

You can create a Fix Layout (everyone sees the same thing) or a Conditional Layout (the layout is different for some people, as an a/b test or according to some other factors).

Positions (page zones)

Your Layout can be separated into several zones on the same page. Each zone has a position and the blocks of each position are provided one after the other by the Narrative Layout.

Layout Blocks

Your layout will consist of a list of Layout Blocks (for each Position).

You can simply add Layout Blocks in your Layout one by one (from top to bottom).

Parameters

Each Layout Block has its own set of parameters defined (this is done by your IT when they configure the Layout Blocks).

This means that while a banner Layout Block might have parameters like “banner-title” and “banner-image”, a message layout Block might have parameters like “icon” and “message-text”.

Nesting

This simply means that each block of your Narrative Layout can have children blocks.

This way, you can create blocks that are containers or layout splitters (two columns, etc.) and put other blocks into them.

As a result, you can create a complete page layout in your narrative, like in the example case of a search result page as in the illustration above, showing Search Facets on the left and, on the main part:

  • Message (to show a Search Message to the user)

  • Banner (to show a banner from your active campaign)

  • Product Grid (to show the list of results)

  • Pagination (to let the user paginate over several pages)

  • SEO Text to add some textual information that might help your SEO

An example screen-shot of how a similar narrative layout looks like in the Intelligence Admin

How does a Widget and a Narrative work together?

The remaining part is now how the response of the Widget (Final Results, Facets et Responses) will be integrated into the Narrative Layout (and how other dynamic content not coming from the Widget can be integrated there as well.

As per the illustration above, many aspects will be connected automatically:

  • The Results will be connected automatically in the Product Grid and the Pagination (bx-hit(s) and bx-pagination parameters)

  • The Facets will be connected automatically (bx-facets parameters)

These “bx-…” parameters are defined by your it in the Layout Blocks to automatically map the data at the right place, so you don’t have to do anything in Layout (except selecting the right Layout Blocks in your layout).

Other dynamic data can be mapped with Narrative variables:

  • The Response (search message)

  • The SEO Text (whether it is coming from content data you have pushed to Boxalino or directly in real-time from your HeadLess CMS through a GraphQL connection)

As a result, when your front-end makes a query to the Narrative (Layout) API, it must indicate one widget, as well as additional parameters:

  • Number of product results required (per page) and a possible offset

  • Additional filters and facets (set by the system or the users themselves)

  • …

The Real-time platform will first execute the Widget to generate the Final Results, Responses, and Facets.

It will then select the right narrative and render it with the content of the widget.

The content is what is returned to your front-end.

Next Steps

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